I’ve heard that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. During KansasFest, that isn’t true — it’s lunch. So many people stay up late and then sleep in that lunch is kind of the new breakfast. Sadly, the food isn’t worth jumping out of bed for.

Right off the bat, we had a thinking session as Mark Pilgrim introduced his research posing the question, ‘can an Apple II program detect if it’s running in an emulator vs. real hardware?’

Up next, Stephen Buggie showed off his solutions for making the Apple IIc a greatly more portable (but still technically ‘luggable’) computer.

For me, the most interesting session of the morning was ‘Controlling I/O Via Game Port Interface’ presented by father and son Andrew and Ivan Hogan. They put on quite the show, with an Apple II controlling a K’NEX roller coaster and a compressed air/water plastic bottle launcher. A couple of the 2L bottles were quickly launched onto the roof of the dorm, over 40′ in the air. The nearby campus security guard didn’t look very amused but this was science!

Ivan Drucker presented the latest 2014 edition of A2CLOUD and A2SERVER, demonstrating to attendees how easy and useful a Raspberry Pi can be when used in conjunction with an Apple II. If you’re not using a Pi now, YOU SHOULD BE.

Tony Diaz tore into an Apple /// to go over the good, the bad and the ugly of the machine’s design. He pointed out mostly the good things about the /// that often go overlooked. Tony physically took the machine apart, showed the crowd the internals and led a Q&A on it’s capabilities and maintenance. Then, he put it back together again. Good times.

Our next session featured Geoff Weiss demonstrating how you can use the Git revision control system for Apple II development. The assumption is made that the programming is taking place in an emulated virtual machine. For example, Geoff was emulating an older Mac with Basilisk running OS 7.5.5 and using the Apple MPW development environment.

After dinner, Ken Gagne lead several participants in an interactive text adventure game called Jungle Adventure. At the same time, Carrington Vanston was teaching a beginner’s course how to setup and use the cc65 cross-compiler on Mac OS X (with some help from Apple’s free Xcode IDE).

About a dozen or so attendees signed up for Vince Briel’s Build a Computer Workshop. Under Vince’s supervision, participants assembled and soldered their own Briel kit. If you ever get a chance to attend one of Briel’s workshops, you should try it. They are a lot of fun.

Later, we remembered Ryan Suenaga and raised money for the scholarship named in his honor. We enjoyed a round of Krispy Kreme donuts and raised a glass of milk to our friend that we miss so much.

Also tonight Daniel Kruszyna presented a performance of ‘Satin Weave’ featuring 3 Apple //c computers. I hope we’ll be able to post a recording of that at some point. Even later is the Structris Tournament, but I’ll probably be too zonked out to watch or participate in that.